Until a week ago, WikiLeaks was a little known website that released information given to them by whistle-blowers in governments and corporations worldwide. With five full-time volunteers, WikiLeaks operated mostly on donations and relied on, according to a spokesperson for their site, around 800-1000 experts for “encryption, programming, and writing news releases.” (NYT) Several governments, [...]
There is a lot of controversy surrounding the recent ACTA proposals now that the 2006 document is circulating and gaining momentum. If you’ve been following tech news at all then you’ll know ACTA is an attempt to make a global DMCA-plus of sorts that would protect intellectual property rights worldwide — changing many countries existing [...]
Digital Nation, a PBS Frontline documentary, premiered a few days back that talked about the negative affects of our nation becoming increasingly connected. Douglas Rushkoff, our usual dweeby guide into the digital frontier, posed great questions in the documentary, but missed the point entirely. As with a lot of Rushkoff’s reporting he finds the anomalies that [...]
Australia finished setting up its great firewall and began filtering their Internet (like much-accused China) this year censoring protests, pornography, and anything else the government-appointed censorship board found to be amoral. The secret, unpublished list has continued to grow as more and more websites are filtered and more reasons to filter are invented. Censorship in [...]
Google reported on its blog today that the company has been repeatedly attacked by Chinese hackers, possibly working for the government, over a span of what could be up to two years. The Mountain View company is using this as an opportunity to finally turn back to their “don’t be evil” philosophy and tell China [...]
Many people made predictions of what 2010 was to hold. Somehow I managed not to stumble across Rik Myslewski’s article in The Register. Whoops. He paints a poignant picture of corporate techno-conspiracy surrounding the growing embrace of cloud computing and the loss of device control as companies such as Apple and Google tell us what [...]
A recent paper from the Columbia Business Law Review by Joshua L. Simmons shows how the government can, and has, been using fourth-parties to acquire your private information. The fourth amendment is supposed to protect us from unlawful search and seizure, however the Supreme Court ruled that acquiring data from third-parties is okay as long [...]